Using climate change interventions adopted by indigenous maize farmers as a strategy for developing primary school agriculture teachers’ competences for disaster risk reduction preparedness in Eswatini

Abstract

This study investigated the role of local indigenous agricultural practices prevalent among Eswatini indigenous farmers in the Wet and Dry Middle-veld selected areas in disaster risk reduction preparedness for maize production. The study also explored the implications of integrating indigenous agricultural practices into the grade 6 and 7 primary school curriculum in Eswatini The study was qualitative in nature. Local farmers from four communities, two from Vusweni and Zombodze and the other two from Nhlambeni and Ngculwini areas in chiefdoms located in the Middle-veld participated in the study. In addition, individual qualified primary school’s agriculture teachers for grade 6 and 7, four (4) teachers located in the Dry Middle-veld primary schools and another four (4) in the Wet Middle-veld primary schools, participated in this study to provide an educational perspective into the research. Data was collected through administration of interviews, observations and artefacts (museum pictures). The participants were permanent residents in the Wet Middle Veld and the Dry Middle Veld. The individual face-to face interview sample consisted of four individual informants from each of the selected communities. In addition, four focus group discussions were also conducted in the same communities with five participants in each group for in-depth understanding of the studied phenomena. Thirty-two (32) participants were involved in the study in total. The transcribed individual interviews and focus group discussions were analysed through textual analysis approach. The findings of the study revealed that indigenous farmers used climate change adaptation interventions for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) preparedness. The indigenous agricultural practices adopted for DRR practices included household coping mechanisms such as soil moisture conservation, improvement of the soil nutrient status for enhanced food security by adding animal manure, intercropping, crop rotation, water harvesting, early planting, planting of legume crops, and fallowing. In addition, the observation and prediction of rain by interpreting the behaviour of plants and animals facilitated the operation of the indigenous farmers planting calendar. The above applied indigenous agricultural practices were still visible in the Middle-veld farming rural areas of Eswatini. The participating individual primary school’s agriculture teachers pointed out that agriculture teachers used some aspects of the indigenous agricultural practices to teach the primary school modern agriculture curriculum. Subsistence farming should remain a viable alternative to commercial farming for food security in Eswatini no matter how small their contribution was to average national annual agricultural production as it supported local indigenous farmers’ livelihoods.